Collaborating around collections

Abstract

This paper explores the embodied interactional ways in which people naturally collaborate around and share collections of photographs. We employ ethnographic studies of paper-based photograph use to consider requirements for distributed collaboration around digital photographs. Distributed sharing is currently limited to the 'passing on' of photographs to others, by email, webpages, or mobile phones. To move beyond this, a fundamental challenge for photoware consists of developing support for the practical achievement of sharing 'at a distance'. Specifically, this entails augmenting the natural production of accounts or 'photo-talk' to support the distributed achievement of sharing.